Parents' Guide to Don't Let Go

Reid and Oyelowo deliver fantastic performances, but the movie's cool sci-fi premise is mostly squandered with blah visuals and an undercooked police corruption subplot. The best part of Don't Let Go is the connection between Jack and Ashley and Jack's quickly mounting terror as he gets his strange phone call from beyond and starts scrambling to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Unfortunately, the way that puzzle comes together is far less satisfying. The movie spends almost no time depicting the relationship between Jack and Ashley's dad/Jack's troubled brother (Brian Tyree Henry) or between Ashley and her parents, so the murders -- which should be the most horrifying event in the movie -- lack a certain dramatic weight. And it's definitely hard to figure out (and even harder to care) just why they were killed, though viewers will hazily understand it has something to do with betrayal and a white-powder drug.

Meanwhile, the film seems to have plenty of time to watch Ashley pedaling around on her bicycle (the L.A. scenery is nice and occasionally atmospheric, but when it crowds out plot, viewers might wonder why) and for the phone calls between her and Jack. Oyelowo and Reid act up a storm (get it?) during these scenes, and it's refreshing to see a thriller that acknowledges how much smartphones have changed cinematic stakes -- it sure is hard to believably strand a movie character these days -- and uses them as an integral element in the plot. But it's also frustrating that for characters who rely so much on their phones to communicate, Jack and Ashley don't seem to know how to use them. Really, they resort to communicating on napkins and with gumballs rather than by snapping pictures of clues and proof for each other to find? It feels not-thought-out, as does much of this featherweight thriller.